Best Games - Black Tiger There was a carousel of arcade machines that rolled through the 7-Eleven just down the street from my high school. A regular noon hour activity was to head down to the ‘sev’ and get in line early enough to take your shot at one of the machines. The games would get changed out every few weeks, unless it was a particularly lucrative game like Street Fighter 2 : Champion Edition. That cabinet sat in the same spot for so long, a crime scene forensics team could probably still detect its presence.

“Games are a journey, and should be covered like travel journalism.” One of the finest descriptions of games writing I have ever read was that line from Heather Anne Campbell.

So I wrote a couple weeks back that I was having trouble with my Huion graphics tablet. I had threatened that I would rebuild the whole pc, reinstall windows if I had to, to get my tools working again. I made good on that threat. 

This is going to seem like some impressively pretentious nonsense. It’s going to seem like semantic garbage. It might even be those things. I think that the way most people typically view art is wrong, and I hope this can clarify some things.

I’m using video games to get in better shape. Well I’m not actually playing the games. I’ve been watching other people play games. So far it seems to be working. 

So, I’ve been trying to get my Huion graphics tablet to work properly on my main PC for a couple of days now. It works fine on the laptop, and presumably, would work properly on any other computer I hooked it up to. The pen tracks without glitches or stutters, but there is no pressure sensitivity. What is more baffling is that I had been using it only a few days ago, and it was working normally. 

Best Games - DoDonPachi speeding wings of light screaming flurry of bullets stillness equals death

That’s good game design! I was sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the widely spread phosphors of a cheap 20 inch color TV. My friend had recently moved his bedroom from the the highest point in his parents aging, but immaculate farm house, to the cool dry of the basement. It’s the move all teenage boys are eager to make. The yearning for the cave lifestyle must be deep in our cellular makeup. He could have stopped there and I would have still thought this new abode lined with Iron Maiden and ACDC emblems, was comfortably epic. He went one further, and picked up an old TV from a relative and bought a brand new SEGA Genesis.

Last year my sons said that they wanted to go as zombies for halloween, but not the regular raggy clothes and dark makeup around the eyes type zombies, Minecraft zombies. Minecraft zombies are nondescript, brown and green boxes with arms and legs. A full body costume consisting mostly of unbendable boxes that I knew they would find to uncomfortable to wear wasn’t going to happen. I managed to talk them down to a set of diamond Minecraft armor. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to accomplish that. Cardboard boxes, cloth attached to a dowel structure. Cardboard would never hold up to how my kids were going to abuse these costumes. I know how to sew, but not competently enough for nice looking costumes. I eventually opted for foam mats and this was the result.

This is post 104. That means that I have written one post per week for two years. Most of the posts are just throwaway bits of hack writing, but once in a while I managed to string together a few cogent points using comprehensible sentences. If anyone is keeping score, I’m probably still running a minus on my stats.

I just finished reading Game Over, a book by David Sheff that came out in 1993. I was reading it because I wanted to read a new book that came out this year, Console Wars, by Blake Harris. I had read or heard that the first makes a good companion piece for the second. While I can now agree that, yes, these two books do form a consistent timeline from the formation of Nintendo 125 years ago, up through the 16 bit era in the mid-90s, I don’t know if that is the way I would recommend anyone else read them. I just happen to have a deep seated interest in both history and video games, so these are books that appeal to my particular tastes. Either one is interesting on it’s own and Console Wars is a bit funnier, and does give you a nice catch up chapter to fill you in on any history you may have missed.

While doing some research for a presentation I may get to delivering, one day, in the far off future, I got to thinking about Truespace. I don’t fault you if you’ve never heard of it. In the history of computer 3D modelling and animation, Truespace barely registers as a footnote. I had fiddled with Povray, and some 3D features of Autocad, but Truespace was the first 3D animation program I ever used. The reason I stuck with it, and actually learned how to use the tools in Truespace can be boiled down to one word. Feedback. If you look at the Truespace (Truespace2 to be exact) interface now, it looks archaic and maybe even a little childish. Even so, it is as friendly and easily parsed as when I fired it up around 1996. When you compare it to the abusive interface of Autocad from the same time, Truespace was probably a full decade ahead of the curve. It all boils down to feedback. If you wanted to move a model around on a flat plane, you would click the translate button, or press the associated hotkey and move your mouse. The model would move. Select rotation and move your mouse, the object would rotate. You could define the axis of motion, rotation, or scale, based on what mouse buttons you clicked and where your hand moved. By this point you are probably wondering what the big deal is. Moving the mouse to move an object on screen is pretty much the way programs work, right? 3D graphics at the time were still barely crawling out of the text editor. The only systems that operated like I just described would cost several thousand dollars and only run on some high end proprietary hardware. Even then, programs like autocad and 3d studio, that may actually be available to the average human, were complex beyond reason. More often than not most programs would have you consider the problem, type in the values that solve the problem, and then redraw the scene to see if your changes worked. In Truespace you would click and drag. Instant Feedback. Truespace was certainly less capable than other 3d animation software of the time, and it was quickly overshadowed by the likes of Lightwave and 3Dstudio Max, but it gave me enough of a head start that I was able to get very comfortable with more advanced software when the opportunity presented itself. Software that provides constant, consistent feedback has always been easier for me to learn. Even when things get very arcane, like the dependency graph in Maya, if the program offers constant feedback (maya is a feedback factory) learning will come easily. Funny enough, that’s how just about all games work.

I’m fairly certain an artist should not be the sole judge of their own work. Maybe a case can be made for the auteurs of the world having the final say on how their work gets presented. I think that is likely rubbish, and any creator given total control and freedom will either make something terrible, or just never finish anything at all.

Best Games - Battlezone It’s the late 1960s. Saturn, Titan, Vostok, and Proton rockets have been launching from both sides of the cold war. The official word is that they have been carrying probes, satellites, astronauts, and cosmonauts. These are science focused spacecraft. The mission is exploration and the betterment of mankind. lies.

We just returned from a trip to Disney World. I could go on and on about how impressive I found nearly every aspect of the park. How the garbage cans are uniquely designed to be both ever present and completely invisible. How lines for rides are finely tuned psychological tricks that can make you feel like you haven’t waited very long at all, while still keeping you thoroughly corralled and out of the way of passing traffic. People at Disney have put an enormous amount of work into making the actual functioning machinery of the park disappear. That is probably why I found the fictional game created for Wreck It Ralph so impressive.